Mae Paner) both offer a haunting picture of those directly within the web of loss. Mora) shadows the lives of those who are tasked to report it and Aswang (2019 dir. Erik Matti) place their characters in the middle of a fictionalized community ravaged by it The Nightcrawlers (2019 dir. Yet the fast-paced nature of today’s mediascape has left most of these important stories buried under the entertainment economy, forgotten in favor of the next thing that triggers moral outrage, of which there is plenty.Ĭinema has responded to this erasure by serving as an archive, taking time to capture the milieu and the changing attitudes towards these violations of human rights. Since Rodrigo Duterte’s rise to power in 2016, the machinery responsible for state-sponsored killings had been set in motion, claiming thousands of lives, mostly from the urban poor. The “war on drugs” has never been an easy topic of discussion.